Saturday, February 25, 2017

Steve Bannon Details Trump Agenda: Deconstruction of the Administrative State

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon detailed President Donald Trump’s agenda during an appearance at CPAC, thrilling the audience of conservatives who wanted to hear more about what Trump would do as president.

Bannon broke the agenda down into three categories. pointing to economic nationalism, national sovereignty, and the deconstruction of the administrative state.

VIDEOBannon And Priebus All Smiles At CPAC

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Part of restoring American sovereignty, Bannon explained, was fixing and improving intelligence, the defense department, and homeland security.

Economic nationalism would focus on restoring American prominence in trade and commerce — “rethinking” how to reconstruct trade deals around the world to favor America first, he said.

Bannon explained that the Trump administration and Congress were already working together to focus on bilateral trade deals with other countries, especially after pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. The goal, he said, was to make America a “fair trading nation” and bring more high paying jobs into America.

The CPAC audience applauded and cheered when Bannon spoke of the deconstruction of the administrative state, cutting cabinet agency regulations that were choking business growth.

“The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency,” he said. “That’s all going to be deconstructed.”

These Are the Groups Behind Those ‘Spontaneous’ Anti-Trump-Ban Protests

02.01.17 11:09 PM ET

On the dark and cloudy morning in Brooklyn after Donald Trump’s Election Night upset, 20 members of the nonprofit Make the Road New York gathered in the conference room of their office for an all-hands emergency meeting.

The Latino and working-class organizing group, which specializes in immigrant rights, had not fully prepared for its nightmare scenario of Trump winning the presidency. Few people in the room believed the Republican candidate had more than a slim chance of victory.

The mood was extremely emotional. Some were visibly distraught, some were furious, some even cried.

But as the day went on, the small huddle of organizers got back to work to chart a course forward—to prepare for what Daniel Altschuler, their director of civic engagement and research, would later describe as a “defining fight of our lives.”

The team worked the phones and started coordinating with their membership and allies in the community for future action and public protest. Within 24 hours, they had a plan for organizing a march that would take place in Manhattan the Sunday after Trump’s election. Roughly 15,000 people flooded the streets to tell their next president, “We will not let you tear our families apart.”

Make the Road New York, and local groups like it, were laying the groundwork for what the country would see on the news out of JFK International Airport less than three months later in response to President Trump’s refugee and “Muslim ban.”

“This is man who actually won on a campaign of hate and xenophobia and sexism… We knew we had to respond rapidly,” Altschuler told The Daily Beast this week. “Folks on our organizing team and communications team were poised to respond rapidly because of what we do… We went out to the airport immediately on Saturday. I was en route to the airport around 11:30 a.m.… We were on the phone with other groups, saying, ‘Bring your people to JFK, bring your friends to JFK.’”

Altschuler and his colleagues spent the following days in near-constant contact with attorneys on the ground and lawyers’ associations, lawmakers, reporters, the New York Immigration Coalition, and immigrant- and minority-rights organizations, including progressive Jewish and Muslim groups.

And Make the Road New York was just one of many groups, virtually unknown and unheard of nationally, leading the anti-Trump mass resistance and airport demonstrations that erupted all across the United States over the weekend.

News reports and TV broadcasts about the week’s protests described the events as “spontaneous protests” mounted in response to the Trump administration’s travel and immigration executive order.

But to Make the Road New York, and the groups like it across the country, there was nothing “spontaneous” about it. As some observers and activists were quick to point out, these grassroots and professional organizers had been waiting and planning for this type of mass, direct action—ready-made to go viral on social media—ever since, well, Nov. 9. From the moment Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the general election, they’ve been anticipating and mapping out their battle plans for Trump’s orders on deportations, bans, and detention.

So when you heard about a large crowd at an airport in the past few days yelling catchy slogans like “FUCK TRUMP, FUCK PENCE, THIS COUNTRY’S BUILT ON IMMIGRANTS,” it was no “spontaneous” outpouring of support. It was the result of a lot of unseen work and man hours.

“It was a domino effect of rapid mobilization,” said Renata Pumarol, communications director at New York Communities for Change, which was also on the ground at JFK. “And going forward, we have our plans in place to resist Trump… and pressuring corporate Dems to resist every appointment, every aspect of Trump’s agenda.”

Over the past weekend, tens of thousands took to the streets in demonstrations in cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Newark, and Los Angeles. Activists in New York who spoke to The Daily Beast were also in close communication with organizers at the O’Hare International Airport “emergency protest,” which took place simultaneously.

“We had been laying the groundwork for this for a long, long time,” Hatem Abudayyeh, the Chicago-born Palestinian-American and executive director of the Arab American Action Network, told The Daily Beast. “We partially have infrastructure in place already as an organizing institution that has a lot of relationships with the strongest organizing institutions in Chicago and around the country. We have been having conversations with our allies and friends and attorneys—we’d been having these conversation before the election. A week before the election, we all had panicked because we were thinking, ‘Oh, man, this guy could definitely win.’”

On Election Night, Abudayyeh and his co-workers knew they needed to prep for a “surge” in their workload and marching. Now he and his allies in Illinois “want to be in the streets as much as possible,” he said.

“We’re inspired by what’s happening all across the country,” he added. “The fascinating thing about Saturday is it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger after the initial call to get out there at 6 p.m. By 8 or 9 o’clock, folks saw this happening live on TV or live on Facebook or live wherever, and they came to it without knowing that it had been called for.”

He and fellow activists have been actively coordinating with other local advocacy groups—Organized Communities Against Deportations, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and the local Black Lives Matter chapter, to name a few—as well as private law firms extending offers of pro-bono work for refugee and immigrant families. It’s been a round-the-clock blitz that those involved expect to continue indefinitely in the Trump era.

“We absolutely have our work cut out for us,” Abudayyeh said. “We talked about that the very first night [on Saturday], knowing we were going to be organizing ’til 2 in the morning and waking up at 6 to start all over again.”

Lara Kiswani, leader of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center, was still losing her voice as of Wednesday, when we talked on the phone. She and the center had been busy during the weekend of protest at San Francisco International Airport.

“We’ve been preparing ourselves [since November] on getting people to understand the rights around protests, especially for undocumented people who are more vulnerable in these situations,” she told The Daily Beast. “We’ve been digging in for a while… given the Trump administration… we have to deepen our work as we’re preparing for these mass mobilizations.”

Along with working with local union leaders and protesters, AROC is a member of the “Bay Resistance” action network, which is bound together by a text-alert system that goes out to the members and leaders of specific social-justice groups.

“The system is for when people are under threat or attacked—and Saturday triggered the text-alert system, and we organized around it, and took some leadership,” Kiswani said. “We stuck around all day and night, and our demands weren’t met. So we decided to call for a shutdown [of the airport] on Sunday because those demands weren’t met. Our demands were simple: Let the lawyers in… [and] let the families out.”

“It’s a time for a culture of resistance,” she continued. “The work now is to get the community to step up and be prepared… and really build across movements while Trump is in office.”

From San Francisco to New York City, her fellow progressive activists are building toward the same long-term objectives of peaceful but noisy resistance.

“This is the moment,” Altschuler said. “We have to continue to elevate the very moral crisis that the Trump administration is creating—we have to every day.”

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Donald Trump had his first cabinet withdrawal yesterday, with Andrew Puzder pulling back from his nomination as secretary of Labor. http://vlt.tc/2q67 The restaurant executive had been opposed vociferously by unions, but the real reason for his withdrawal was that it had become readily apparent there were wavering Republicans thinking of opposing him, including Tim Scott and Johnny Isakson. http://vlt.tc/2q5i

Whatever for? Well, if you are reading most of the coverage of his withdrawal, it will cite the talking points advocated by his critics from the left: that his restaurants failed to pay living wages, that his ethics reports were lacking, that his ex-wife accused him of abuse in an appearance on Oprah – accusations she later retracted. http://vlt.tc/2q67 But was that really what was going on here? Was Puzder really terrified of the grilling he was going to receive from Elizabeth Warren?

Not really. Virtually all the union and union-friendly organizations that opposed Puzder’s nomination were also opposed to Betsy DeVos. The difference is that Puzder was also opposed by those on the right over his immigration stances. National Review’s editors opposed his confirmation for these reasons. http://vlt.tc/2q6o “Puzder himself has been a reliable font of clichés in favor of higher levels of legal immigration. He has suggested that “the fact is that there are jobs in this country that U.S. citizens, for whatever reason, are reluctant or unwilling to perform”—a cliché that ignores the possibility of raising wages to attract citizens—and as recently as 2015 encouraged reviving the Gang of Eight approach to immigration. His views on immigration aren’t merely academic for this post. The Department of Labor bears a significant amount of responsibility for enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”

This is Trump’s first cabinet withdrawal. Obama technically had four, so the odds seem to favor at least one additional withdrawal. http://vlt.tc/2q7f The next to drop could be Wilbur Ross, who is refusing to give up his stake in a Chinese-Government-Backed company whose fortunes he could impact significantly in his role at the Commerce Department. http://vlt.tc/2q7g This sets him up, again, as someone who could find critics in both parties – the necessary recipe for a nominee’s failure.

That accurate depiction of Puzder being squeezed from both sides, is largely going to be absent in the reports on what went down with his nomination. Instead you’ll get more of: How Elizabeth Warren Found a Villain in Andy Puzder. The first four paragraphs are about the author’s mood while watching The Big Short, and Puzder is mentioned in only a passing way in the article, as a foil for the courageous Warren. Here is his musing on her depiction on the most prominent liberal show on television, Saturday Night Live: http://vlt.tc/2q6r “Playing Warren on “SaturdayNight Live” last week, Kate McKinnon treated the “Weekend Update” anchors’ desk like the Senate dais, reading from a list of questions in order to press the hosts to answer for the crime of allowing Trump to appear on the show. Colin Jost asked if she was always like this. “As a matter of fact, yes,” McKinnon’s Warren said. McKinnon’s voice was perfect, and she captured the disbelief in the “uh-huh,” but she missed what Warren’s tightened jaw reveals: not tension but an elemental fury. Warren is trying to persuade a country that accepts some, but not enough, of her premises, that we are not drifting but being held hostage—and that the villains are the ones she has spotted. There is not as much Tracy Flick in Warren as there is in her public image. There is more Chautauqua.”

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
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RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com